by W. Eric Martin

Non-final coverMy favorite games tend to be ones in which the rules disappear, and all you have to concern yourself with is interacting with other people, although perhaps a more accurate way to say this is games in which rules are secondary to the game experience. You're not playing the game in order to gain the satisfaction of having played a game, but of having played with people.

Jacob Jaskov, designer of Fog of Love, has launched a new game company that seems geared toward my tastes, with the first two titles from Uloomi requiring only a minute to teach and being all about the interactions with your fellow players.

Our Secret Society is a Kasper Lapp design that asks you to follow rules — and while games have been published along these lines, these often have players institute rules in order to affect something else in the game, as in Bruno Faidutti's Democrazy, which has you pass laws affecting the value and ownership of colored chips.

Our Secret Society does away with the extras and has you focus entirely on the rules and how they affect your behavior. On a turn, you choose one of the three rule cards in your hand, read it aloud to everyone else — while adhering to that rule, as well as all other rules already in play! — then place the rule on the table and draw a new card.


If you fail to adhere to a rule, you're ejected from our secret society and your proposed rule isn't added to play since clearly you're not fit to be one of us. Keep playing until only one person remains, thereby forming a secret society of one winner.

Normally I detest performative games in which you're going to look foolish, but that's because the foolishness is imposed on you from the outside. In Bite Your Tongue, you have to hold your nose, hold your tongue, or both while giving clues so that others can guess a person, place, or thing. Hasbro's Speak Out does the same thing, but with players wearing a mouthpiece that doesn't let their teeth or lips touch. The format has you enter a predetermined embarrassing situation, then do that embarrassing thing.

Our Secret Society is somewhat similar, but the nonsense is player controlled. You decide (from a limited choice) which rules will go in play for you and everyone else to follow. You are setting the guidelines under which everyone will perform, akin to an improv performance with everyone being both performer and audience member yelling our suggestions.

I've played a few times on a mock-up copy and what I thought was a final copy that turned out to be almost final, and the game has been great fun each time, with subsequent rules often playing off what's come before because you like the idea of forcing everyone to row a boat while speaking or salute the rule-giver or speak angrily no matter what they say or pause uncomfortably before introducing their rule. You have to do the new rule first, so you're unlikely to add a rule that you would find unpleasant before passing the baton to someone else, which means you're all engineering fun in a way that suits your personality.

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The Vibe is a Jaskov design that consists of large cards with art on one side and a single word on the other. Each round, lay out five cards each with art and word face up. Whoever takes the role of "The Vibe" secretly chooses one of the five words, then arranges all of the art cards in order from "least has the chosen quality" to "most has the chosen quality", after which everyone else discusses which word is embodied by this particular card order. Here's an example:


I hope you can forgive the glare and guess which word The Vibe had in mind. If you guess correctly, great, guess correctly in two more rounds in order to win...although as you might imagine with this type of design, winning is kind of beside the point.

The game means to stimulate conversation and debate over what you're seeing. After all, the same five cards are laid out in front of everyone, but you'll likely interpret those cards in different ways. What does "grief" look like? How is "equality" or "chaos" depicted in each of these images?

The Vibe wants you to succeed, so they're (ideally) going to choose a word that they can lead you to with these images, but not everyone sees things the same way. In effect, the game is the intermediary that can lead to pleasant discussions over how you view the concept of, say, "community" and what an expression of community would look like. You might not win The Vibe, but winning isn't the point of playing.


Technically, you can't lose The Vibe. The rules say that if you guess incorrectly, your "guessing clock" starts over, and you re-start the path toward guessing three words correctly, which means you might fail to win before you box up the game for the evening, but you haven't lost.

This is the only aspect of the design that bugs me as I want a fail condition — yet I think the lack of a way to lose is precisely the point for Jaskov. If you keep communicating with people, you can overcome different points of view to understand one another and reach a common goal. You don't win by dismissing people or declaring their thoughts invalid or bullying them into submission, but by viewing the world through their eyes and hoping they'll do the same in order to appreciate the varied humanity in us all.

For more thoughts on the games and examples of play, watch this video:

Youtube Video